The cold cavern air scraped across my skin, sharp as shattered glass dragged slowly along exposed nerves. The cold slipped beneath the iron collar locked around my throat, seeping into the space between metal and flesh, tightening with cold, patient cruelty as if it wanted to remind me that breath was something I could still lose.

I would never get used to being out of the enclosed training grounds.

The war camp sprawled across the scarred bones of the land at the edge of the underdark, just this side of the Krathon Mountains that separated the drow’s imprisonment from the faewild. Rumor had it that the tunnels under the mountains could lead you to the faewild if you really tried to find it. Rumor also said more died in those tunnels than ever came out again.

Purple banners overhead were stretched out on their frameworks so that the spider insignias that were stitched into them with silver thread could be clearly seen.

Jagged obsidian war towers rose from the earth like broken teeth punched up through the jaw of the world itself. Their surfaces were wet-looking in the cold light that came from glow crystals that nearly covered the Krathon mountains. Inside the fortress itself, smoke curled upward from the slave pits in slow, sluggish spirals.

It had been three days since they pulled me from my training camp, uprooting me and promising me glory on the battlefront as a draconic war slave, or “eziot” as they called me. Three days of cold-forged shackles clamped around my wrists, ankles, and about my neck, the metal humming faintly with suppression magic that felt like pressure on my draconic blood. Like hands pressing down on my chest, forcing my lungs to work harder for every breath, or a heaviness that hung, invisible, from my shoulders.

Despite the magical suppression, my dragon blood broiled beneath the surface, hungry and angry at being entrapped in mortal flesh. Hot. Restless. Slow and coiled like a creature pacing inside a cage too small for its wingspan. I could feel it breathing with me, synchronized with my heartbeat, patient in a way that felt more dangerous than rage. Rage burned bright and fast. This was something deeper. Perhaps hatred.

I was weak from transport. Hungry in a way that made my thoughts feel thin.

The wagon stopped with a grinding protest of wheels against stone, the sound sharp enough to make my teeth ache.

A guard struck the metal cage with the shaft of a spear. “Out, slave,” he ordered.

The door opened with a long, rusty scream of metal that sounded almost alive in the echoing of the underdark.

I saw everything at once. We had arrived in the courtyard of the fortress. Rows of prisoners were chained together across the stone ground. They were mostly drow, which were my own people, their dark purple, silver, and gray skin dulled by dust and exhaustion. But there were dwarves among them too, heavy-shouldered and stubborn in posture even under chains that forced them to bow slightly forward. Their pride did not disappear under captivity. How had they come to be here? Had they dug down from the sunlit lands so far that they ended up here, in this pit of despair?

Near the end of one line stood a faerie woman, wings folded tightly against her back as if she could shrink herself small enough to become invisible. Her shoulders were hunched, not just from fear but from the effort of making herself less noticeable to eyes that had learned how to hunt weakness.

Drow soldiers stood in tight formation, armor dark and polished like obsidian polished to mirror-sharp perfection. Their weapons rested in their hands with the casual intimacy of tools they had trained with for so long they were no longer separate from them.

At the far end of the courtyard, a command platform rose above everything else. It was draped in silk banners that were stitched with the purple fire symbol of the Sit’Aire family who owned me.

Above it all, watching the arrivals like a hunter, stood a tall drow woman in dark armor. I could feel the tension of the power that she wielded. Like most she-drow, she felt strong in magic as well as in physicality. Almost like gravity had decided to lean slightly in her direction, or perhaps had been commanded to do so and obeyed out of fear.

She stared at me as I was brought towards her platform by the guards and I felt very small beneath that gaze. I tried to keep my breathing steady. In, out, in, out. Survive. Always survival above all else. It was all I had to hold onto.

Her gaze was assessing. Measuring.

The guards brought me to a halt before her, then released me from their claw-like grasp and took a couple of steps back, so that I stood, alone, before the commander.

A subtle movement from the she-drow made the shackles about my limbs and neck hum with warmth and I straightened sharply.

“Eziot,” she said. It wasn’t a command, but rather an observation. “What are you called, eziot?” she demanded.

I attempted to swallow, but there was no saliva in my mouth. “T’Ryndor eziot Sit’Aire.”

The seventieth dragon slave of the Sit’Aire family. Quite the title for a slave who had never been outside his family’s training grounds until three days ago.

I tried not to think about what came before. About the road here, or the life that had existed before this. I thought about the next breath and the one after that.

She lifted one gloved hand in a slow, deliberate gesture. “Bring him,” she commanded.

The guards caught hold of my arms and pulled me forward towards the platform. Toward her. Toward whatever future she had already decided I belonged to before I had ever arrived.

I did not fight them. For now, obedience seemed the only path to survival.

Up close, the armored she-drow was even more imposing than she had seemed from the courtyard below. Her armor shone in the light of the glow crystals. Her slaves kept it meticulously clean, and it fit her powerful frame perfectly.

Her eyes were silver. Sharp as drawn blades and as clever as they come.

She circled me once, unhurried, the way a buyer circles a labor beast at market. Not cruelly, but simply with the practiced efficiency of someone accustomed to making assessments that matter.

“You do not kneel,” she observed.

She was reading my position, my will, the texture of whatever resistance might live in me.

Her gaze moved to my scales; the faint ridges along my brow, cheekbones, and neck; the subtle iridescence beneath my skin where my draconic heritage lay in evidence of my birth.

“You were trained well, I hear,” she said. “And they preassigned you a handler. What makes you so important to them?”

I said nothing. I had been trained for places like this. This was a place of war. There were rumors of glory to be had, battles to be won, and stories to be told on the front lines like this. I was sure she had never seen such a young eziot as myself be sent to the front lines fresh out of training. Perhaps my youth was what was sparking her question?

I felt something brush against my intestines. Magic? Not from her. From beneath the camp somewhere. There it was again! Something was sending tendrils of power up through the ground at my feet and wrapping around me, searching, studying, assessing.

My stomach tightened, but I kept my face still.

She finished her circle and stepped closer. Close enough that I could see the faint web-shaped scar across her temple, pale against her dark skin. Magic had struck her there many years before but she had survived.

“What are your duties, eziot?” she asked softly.

I hesitated. Was this a trick question?

She placed two fingers beneath my chin and tilted my face upward, almost gently, and the collar ignited.

Pain exploded through my nervous system. It felt like white-hot ice raced up my spine and down to my fingertips. It was surgical in its precision. Each nerve seized individually and held in place by invisible, precise force. My muscles locked. My vision fractured into shards of silver light. My breath caught in my throat and stayed there, trapped.

It lasted only two seconds, but it felt considerably longer. Her fingers remained beneath my chin throughout, and when the pain stopped, I found I was still upright, still looking at her, still breathing, though I felt as though I had just died for a moment.

Her voice, when she spoke again, was conversational. “Your duties are to obey your handler. Step out of line, and you will be most severely punished.”

She turned away from me then, assessment complete, attention already moving forward. She motioned to the guards. “Throw him in the pit.”

One of the guards hesitated. “Commander…”

She did not look back. “Put the faerie in with him.”

The guards seemed to understand. I was dragged back into the courtyard, where, in the center, the ground was opening like a sliding door, revealing a round pit in the shape and size of a fighter’s arena. Too deep for the fighters to escape, shallow enough for the onlookers to get a good view. Iron bars encircled its edges like the ribs of some buried beast.

The soldiers and slaves alike gathered like flies to watch what was to come, anticipating violence and amusement.

The guards dragged me toward the pit as panic gripped at my insides and threatened to make me scream and fight back. I kept myself from resisting. Resisting would mean punishment. I had to think! What was this pit for? Was I meant to fight someone? I was a war eziot, not a fighter! My power was in my blood, not my fists!

They shoved me forward. The pit entrance loomed open like a wound in the stone, and they unceremoniously threw me in. For a moment, I was free falling, then I hit the cold stone with a terrible crack straight in the face. My hands stung where I had tried to break my fall. My heart was pounding in my ears, as if my dragon’s blood was trying to escape.

As I scrambled to my feet, trying to catch my breath, they threw something else inside.

A faerie. She was small for her race and there was terror in her green eyes as she stared at me from across the ring.

A blade clattered across the stone floor between us. The crowd began to gather around the pit’s edge, voices rising, betting, measuring, waiting to see what I would do.

A horn sounded once. The fae girl lunged for the knife and snatched it up savagely in her bloodied fist. With a shriek, she charged me.

I instinctively reached for my inner fire, but the collar seared against my skin and I realized I was about to be stabbed in the face by this fae because my dragon’s blood was suppressed.

I dodged to the side just barely in time to avoid the knife, but her claws tore through my tunic and left bleeding marks on my shoulder.

The onlookers exclaimed, leaning close to get a better view of the fight.

She came at me again, and again I dodged, trying to summon my powers, but to no avail. The collar throbbed with heat against my throat, threatening to bring me down with the pain it possessed.

Someone laughed at my expense. “He thinks he can use his powers with the collar on?”
I glared up towards the onlookers. Drow soldiers, fellow slaves, even a few other eziots with scales on their faces and arms. They appeared to be thoroughly enjoying the show.

“You or me, dragon blooded,” the fae hissed in so heavy an accent that I could barely understand her.

“What do they want?” I asked, trying to hide the fear that was twisting around my intestines.

She twisted her head to the side in an uncanny movement. “Why you must kill me, love,” she said with a hiss. “Or I will feast on your flesh.”

I hesitated. She lunged again, laughing as I dodged.

“You wish not to die proud?” she taunted. “All you drow are weaklings. Even the dragon blooded drow who could make something of themselves choose to stay weak. Cowards.” She coughed and dark red blood spilled down her chin. Death was already waiting on her arrival, it would seem, judging off the unseen wounds she was apparently suffering from. Such was the fate of fae who left the faewild in search of mushrooms and crystals in the underdark.

She grinned, her pointy teeth shining with blood. “Coward!” she shrieked as she leaped for my throat.

I threw up my hands, unable to dodge fast enough, and flames burst from them, purple and blue, engulfing her completely.

If it was not for her scream, I would have thought the flames had not touched her in the slightest. We fought madly as we crashed to the floor of the arena, her on top of me and clawing madly at my throat. I caught hold of her wrists in the chaos and, by strength alone, wrenched her off of me, rolled over on top of her, and fought desperately to get the blade from her hand. It cut my finger open and tore through part of her wing near her shoulder. My fingers slipped off the handle because of the blood she had unwittingly covered it with. I lunged again, finally getting a good grasp on the blade, and, turning it about, I drove it deep into her chest.

As the flames died about us and she began to go limp, I stared in horror into her face.

She was smiling. “Only…death,” she gasped, then she went still.

I felt my heart racing and I could not look away from her lifeless face. The onlookers exclaimed and cheered at the good show. I turned and looked up towards the she-drow commander and saw that she was speaking to a white-haired he-drow who was staring blankly down at me.

“He will need a stronger collar,” she was saying. “And bleed him daily. I have no desire to see him burn the whole place down.”

The he-drow nodded and motioned to the guards nearby. They brought over a makeshift platform that they lowered into the pit with ropes. The handler pulled me onto the platform and the slaves up top began hoisting us up. As we were rising up towards the courtyard, I saw a shadow rush from the darkness in the pit and engulf the dead faerie. Seconds later, it left, and the body was gone without a trace.

The crowd had begun to dissipate as we reached the courtyard. The white-haired he-drow grabbed me by the arm and directed me off to the side of the courtyard, the guards leaving me to his care.

He did not look old, despite his white hair. In fact, he looked rather young. His pale lavender skin was covered in a myriad of pale blue runes, common in wizards who used their magic without books.

He was not much older than me, I guessed. He looked familiar for some reason but I could not quite place him.

“I am your handler,” the he-drow said, opening a door into a study.

I was still reeling from the fight as I looked around the unexpectedly bright room. Books and shelves and cluttered worktables filled every available space, and the light came not from torches or lanterns but from glowing mushrooms and pale crystals growing directly out of the walls, as though the room had grown around the study and not the other way around. The smell was dry parchment and something chemical underneath, sharp and metallic. I had smelled that before. A certain type of magic. The smell stuck in my nostrils and refused to leave.

In the middle of the room, a woman in dark robes stood at a table, flipping through the pages of a book that I was fairly certain was still alive. The pages moved faintly between her fingers, seemingly of their own free will.

She did not look up as she spoke. “Set him there,” she said, nodding toward a low stool near the center of the room, positioned inside a circle of faintly glowing runes carved into the stone floor.

The handler guided me to the stool with a hand on my shoulder as if he were guiding a child to its seat at the dinner table.

I sat down obediently and instantly felt the weight of the magical suppression vanish.

The woman finally closed her book. Or perhaps the book closed itself. I wasn’t entirely sure. She turned to look at me with the expression of someone assessing a piece of equipment that had been delivered slightly damaged. Then, with a quick twist of her hand, she caused the collar around my neck to snap off and float through the air to her hands.

I considered for a moment that they did not have any way of controlling me now. Should I run? Start a fight?

“Do not even think of it, eziot,” the woman said without taking her eyes from her examination of the collar. “The rune circle will kill you if you try to run.”

I pushed all thought of escape from my mind as fear of the runes came over me.

Her fingers moved over the collar in slow, precise patterns, murmuring something under her breath that wasn’t quite language, or at least wasn’t any language I recognized. The runes in the floor warmed faintly beneath my boots. I could feel the magic in the room shifting at her voice and her words.

The handler leaned against a bookshelf and watched, his arms folded and his brow drawn up into a frown.

She stopped speaking and tossed the collar into a wastebasket near her desk. “No wonder. This would not function well as a child’s toy. I will make a better enchantment.”

I watched in silence as she rummaged through a trunk in a corner, then she returned with a bowl and a knife. She held the bowl beneath my hands and, one by one, cut open my palms with a whispered word each time the knife sliced. I winced, turning my eyes away. It never got less painful.

Magical bleeding. It was said the very rich would pay much for the blood of an eziot. It was said it carried dragon’s power in its purest form and was used to keep an eziot from burning out from the weight of the dragon’s blood carried in mortal veins.

She drained blood from me until the bowl was nearly full. I could feel my powers weakening as the blood trickled out of me. Then, satisfied with the amount, she walked away, muttering under her breath.

My handler stepped forward, taking some bandage material from a leather pouch at his belt. As he wrapped my hands up, I watched the woman as she took an unmarked collar from a pile on her desk, spoke words over it, and dropped it into the bowl of blood.

“I will give only you the key to remove the collar,” the woman said, reaching into the bowl with a pair of tongs. She pulled out the collar, now covered in a myriad of blue runes, like to those on my handler’s skin.

She clasped it about my throat, then took the knife and pricked my handler’s finger, sealing the collar with his blood.

“None but you may remove the collar,” she said. “His own blood will bind him until such time as you decide to remove it, if you make such a decision.”

The new collar settled into place. For a moment there was nothing. Then it warmed, just slightly, and I felt the enchantment spread outward from it in a slow, deliberate pulse, mapping itself to me, learning whatever it needed to learn. It wasn’t painful. It was worse than pain, in some ways. Precise to me, a magic that was specifically interested in me rather than simply applied to me. Then it settled somewhere inside me, like a parasite.

The woman stepped back and gave me the same assessing look she’d given the collar.

“It will respond to emotional surges,” she told me, in the tone of someone explaining the features of a tool to the person assigned to carry it. “It also is bound to your handler. It is not the generic collars that your fellow slaves wear. It is stronger, as you need one that is stronger. Because of this, the amount of pain your handler can apply through this can and will kill you. I suggest you keep on his good side.”

She turned back to her table. The handler unfolded his arms and glanced at me for a moment, something passing across his face that I couldn’t read, before he looked back at her.

“Lady Thessiel,” he said. “The Lady Commander’s orders regarding his deployment…”

Thessiel made a sound that was not quite a sigh and not quite dismissal. “I’ve read them.”

“Then you understand the timeline,” my handler said.

“The timeline,” she said, selecting a new book from the shelf beside her with the particular patience of someone who has had this conversation before and finds it marginally more irritating each time. “The timeline is ambitious.”

“We lost the Krathon tunnels a century ago,” my handler continued.

“I am aware of how long the Krathon tunnels have been lost, Kiran,” she said patiently.

His name landed in my mind and I held it there carefully. Kiran. White hair. Young face. Familiar in a way I still couldn’t resolve.

“A century,” Kiran continued, unmoved by her tone, “during which the It’arri have held every major passage under the eastern range and cut our resupply lines to three functioning routes. The Lady Commander believes…”

“The Lady Commander believes that if you put enough power behind a problem it stops being a problem,” Lady Thessiel said. “She is occasionally correct, but most of the time she is too headstrong.” She set the book down and looked at him directly. “You’re telling me this one is meant to take the tunnels back?”

Kiran nodded. “We are supposed to, yes.”

“The Krathon tunnels are nearly eighty miles of close-passage fighting in near-total darkness against an enemy that has had a century to fortify every single chokepoint,” she said.

Kiran did not answer. Was he afraid?

“This is one of the few times I am inclined to believe the Lady Commander is right about this,” the woman said. “This eziot is the strongest I have ever seen. You know this all falls on you, Kiran?”

My handler gulped and swallowed, nodding. He was not much older than I was, and yet this task was to be ours, and ours alone.

“Be kind to your eziot,” she continued. “He will either be the cause of your glory or the death of you both. Understand?”

Kiran nodded. “Thank you, Lady Thessiel.” He grabbed me up and pulled me from the circle of runes before I could become afraid they would kill me.

“Oh, and Kiran,” Lady Thessiel said as we reached the door.

Kiran stopped and looked back towards her.

“Give your eziot a name that is not a number. The Seventieth is not a name befitting a war hero.”

Kiran nodded with a faint smile. “Yes, ma’am.”